By Alexandra Ulmer
ST. HELENA, California (Reuters) – Last October, firefighter Ryan Bellanca and his crew battled to keep the raging Glass Fire from devastating an upmarket Napa Valley vineyard.
But Bellanca wasn’t working for any fire department. He owns a private company that had been hired to protect the vineyard. Authorities from Cal Fire and the Napa County Sheriff’s office eventually stepped in and detained the private firefighters for several hours, according to Bellanca and a sheriff’s office report. Bellanca said Cal Fire accused his crew of lighting dangerous backfires and failing to leave an evacuated area.
Economic Crises in Foreign Markets Reduce U.S. Agricultural Exports by William M. Liefert, Lorraine Mitchell, and Ralph Seeley
Highlights:
Economic crises in foreign markets reduce U.S. agricultural exports in several ways. An economic crisis will result in consumers earning a lower income in the affected countries, which leads to decreased demand for imported products. Additionally, a crisis can weaken the currencies of those countries against the U.S. dollar, making imports from the United States more expensive for their consumers.
During the world financial/economic crisis of 2008-09, agricultural imports from the United States by seven large foreign markets hit by the crisis (including Japan, China, the European Union, and Mexico) collectively fell in 2009 by 17 percent from $83 billion to $68 billion compared with 2008.
Montana company offering wildfire protection to some Spokane home, farm owners
Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA)
Apr. 18 Nearly 300,000 homes and farms in
Washington just received an added defense against destructive wildfires, part of a growing national trend intended to reduce the devastation of longer, more intense fire seasons.
Wildfire Defense Systems, a
Bozeman-based company that deploys trained and certified firefighters to several states in the West, has teamed up with
State Farm to provide protection services to policyholders in
Washington.
April 1, by a mailing from the company earlier this month.
The service comes at no additional cost to policyholders, and includes services typical of home and property defense during a wildfire. That includes vegetation removal and setting up sprinkler systems. Firefighters working for Wildfire Defense Systems can also apply flame-retardant gel to homes that are in danger of catching fire, and they do so with the agreement of l
Researchers at the University of York found that ultra-grip shoes lessened the number of NHS staff slipping and falling
YORK researchers have shown that the NHS could cut the number of staff going off sick by making ultra-grip shoes part of the uniform. .A study was conducted by the York Trials Unit at the University of York in collaboration with the Health and Safety Executive, Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust and the University of Leeds, and involved seven NHS Trusts. Half of staff who volunteered to take part were asked to wear their own choice of shoes to work and the other half were provided with shoes with the HSE’s highest grip rating of 5 for a period of 14 weeks.